Such mail deemed to be non-mechanically sortable includes, for example, bulky letters, business and other "reply cards", magazines mailed with address bands or in plastic protective wrapping, same-address bulk mail and other types of mail, all of which generally come in bulk or loosely stacked in boxes or trays.
Whereas those articles making up the mechanically sortable mail category are processed automatically in separating machines enabling them to be picked one by one from a pile and sent to a mail sorting or distributing facility, those articles making up the non-mechanically-sortable category being the object of this invention are usually handpicked from the stock and manually sorted.
One example of such an installation for carrying out the ordering and individual pick-up of mechanically sortable mail articles is described in French patent document No. 2,382,387. In that installation groups of articles are inserted between moving feed means. The motion of the feed means jogs the articles against a backstop to align them by one of their edges and then conveys them to a distributing means. The distributing device, a rotary pick-up drum operating by means of a vacuum exerting pull through its perforated wall, picks up the articles one by one as the pins driving each set of articles before the drum are retracted.
It is the object of the present invention to enable automatic processing of mail hereto classified as non-mechanically-sortable.